The Problem with Perfect
Retrieved from https://www.ticketnews.com/
Practice makes perfect. At least that’s what my fifth-grade basketball coach used to say.
When we repeat a process, we get better at it. The reps help us figure out what works and what doesn’t, what’s helpful and what’s not. And we get smoother, faster-- more efficient and more skilled-- at whatever it is we are practicing. From dribbling a basketball to changing a tire to speaking in front of people, the more we do it, the better we get.
Mostly, we revere that logic, whether we employ it or not. We revere it because it never doesn’t work--even when what we’re perfecting is a bad habit. Scientifically, it has been proven. Repetition sears a sequence in our brains. And yet, when we have perfection in our heads, getting reps can seem an impossible thing to do. Nobody wants to paint an ugly picture or write a porous story or build a crooked chair.
Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you look at it-- that’s how we get to good. And then to better. And hopefully, at some point, on to great. The only road to perfection (if that indeed is even a place) is the one you have to drive down and back and down and back and down and back again.
In their book, Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland recount a story they call the Pottery Parable. In it, a ceramics teacher announces on the opening day of pottery class that the students will be divided into two groups for the semester. All those on the left side of the room will be in the quantity group. All of those on the right side will be in the quality group. The quantity group will be graded on the number of pots they produce. A certain number will earn an “A,”a certain number a “B,” and so on. The quality group will be graded on the perfection of just one pot. And then a funny thing happens at the end of the class—the highest quality pots come from the quantity crew.
Of course they did. Trial and error is how we learn. (If we’re paying attention.) Mistakes are like rungs on a ladder we step on to improve. The more we produce the better we get. But it was more than repetition that led to quality pots. Freedom from the goal of building “perfect” gave them license to try things.
Coaches love to remind their teams that, “The enemy of the best is good.” And it can be. When things are going well, it’s sometimes challenging to tinker or reach. It becomes easy to just enjoy the status quo, so we don’t stretch, we just hang out. We settle and “the best” stays out of reach.
But the saying also works in reverse. “The best,” just as often, gets in the way of good. Confucius originally said it, then Voltaire, then Shakespeare also piled on. When perfection is the goal line, we don’t take off and run, we sit and stare. And theorize. And contemplate. And wring our hands and eat potato chips. We find it really hard to make mistakes.
Coach Wooden famously said, “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” I had that on our locker room wall in letters larger than life. Just running around in circles won’t make anybody get much better at any sort of thing (other than running around in circles, I presume). Coach’s point was: have a purpose. Activity fueled by curiosity and anchored in intent is a game changer--intent on being perfect was neither part of his mantra nor his plan. When we create and look for feedback, and re-create and look for more, a vicious cycle of improvement is set in motion. Every iteration gives us information for getting better at what we do. Better is the target that propels us; perfect is the one that locks the brakes.
For a writer, a blank page is often overwhelming. It’s hard to find the perfect place to start. That’s, of course, because there isn’t one. You find the beginning by writing. The most important thing for any writer to do is get words down on a page, and yet we wrestle, especially at the beginning, with the critic in our heads over the right word, the best word, the flawless opening line. When getting it perfect becomes the focus, the words play hide-and-seek. And perfection is crazy clever. Uninvited, it sneaks in. I know this from real-time experience--this paragraph has been excruciating. The more time I spend pondering perfect, the harder every sentence is to write.
Retrieved from https://pedrodiazridao.com/
The Japanese have a practice called Kintsugi where they repair cracks in pottery by gluing them together in paste dusted with gold. It’s their way of celebrating mistakes, and its metaphorical application, spiritually, is forgiveness. The golden scars represent value. But what I love most about the mindset is that it moves perfect out of the way. Without that ogre looming overhead, progress can be made.
Quality is never an accident. It doesn’t fall down from the sky. It doesn’t happen by spontaneous combustion. It rises from a batch of fair attempts. A lot of mediocre gets produced on the way to wow…a place we can only get to if perfect is not where we’re trying to go.